


unseen, unheard

by EllisLuie



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Angst, Drug Use, Extra-Ordinary: My Life as Number Seven, Hurt/Comfort, Klaus & Vanya Bonding, Klaus Hargreeves Needs A Hug, Klaus confronts Vanya about her book, Miscommunication, Pre-Canon, Vanya Hargreeves Needs A Hug, Vanya got some stuff wrong in her book, they both get one
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-09
Updated: 2020-07-09
Packaged: 2021-03-04 20:41:44
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,959
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25172542
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EllisLuie/pseuds/EllisLuie
Summary: He’s high and fresh from rehab, bracelet still hanging loosely from his wrist, and his feet are bare. There’s a copy of her book clutched tightly in his hand.
Relationships: Klaus Hargreeves & Vanya Hargreeves
Comments: 12
Kudos: 424





	unseen, unheard

Out of all her siblings, Vanya never expected to stay in contact with Klaus outside the Academy.

They hadn’t been close, growing up, though she supposes she hadn’t really been close with anyone, other than Five. But Five and Klaus had had a strange fondness for each other, even though sometimes it was hard to believe when they went days at a time where the only words they said to each other were sharp and painful. Vanya learned early on that the two of them actually enjoyed those times, seeing who could twist the knife better, who could triumph over the other; she didn’t understand it, couldn’t imagine ever wanting her brother to speak to her with that disdain and cruelty, but she couldn’t deny how - freer Five seemed, happier, after verbally assaulting Klaus, and vice versa. Vanya didn’t understand her brothers, but she’s never really understood any of them, so that’s okay.

Her relationship with Klaus had been better before Five disappeared, the three of them often existing in the same space. Klaus would drag them to Griddy’s, or she and Klaus would work together to force Five to stop defacing the walls and go to bed, or Klaus and Five would patiently sit and listen to her play. She was unsure of herself around Klaus, didn’t know how she fit with him, not like Five, but she had to admit it was - nice, having a co-conspirator.

Then Five ran away and Klaus and Vanya didn’t have anything to tie them together anymore. They tried, the first few months, or at least Klaus did, hovering in her doorway when she played and, once, accompanying her to the kitchen to make Five’s nightly sandwich. But Vanya was all exposed nerves back then, waiting for the moment where Klaus would berate her, use that poisonous tone he shared with Five, and she can admit now that she had pushed him away, though that hadn’t been her intention. He hadn’t put up much of a fight, though, and that had been the final nail in the coffin.

Klaus had found drugs soon after that, and Vanya couldn’t be in the same room as him, couldn’t stand with any of her siblings when there was a gap between them. So she’d retreated to her room and dedicated herself to her violin, waiting and planning for the day she could leave.

She moved out two weeks before Pogo called to tell her Ben had died.

None of her siblings reached out to her, and she didn’t speak to them at the funeral.

So it’s a surprise to answer a knock at her door, two months after she had fretted and doubted and finally published her book, to find Klaus. He’s tall and lanky and skinner than she remembers, unsteady on his feet and clinging to the doorframe. There’s a copy of her book clutched tightly in his hand.

“I admire your balls to air our dirty laundry to all of Oz,” he says, a smile on his face and a hardness in his eyes. “But you got some stuff wrong.”

Vanya invites him in.

He’s high and fresh from rehab, bracelet still hanging loosely from his wrist, and his feet are bare. She doesn’t ask but he tells her anyway, breezy and flippant, that he hadn’t had any money when they discharged him. She hadn’t even known he’d been in rehab, hadn’t known he’d been before. She wonders where they had expected him to go with no money.

She makes them tea.

Klaus blinks into the mug in his hands, shaking and in danger of spilling. The book sits between them on the couch, her own face looking up at her, searching, accusing. Vanya sits next to this creature who only faintly resembles her brother and thinks about the dismissive words she’d written, condemning and sad and wistful. She’s harsh on Klaus, in the book, harsher than maybe she has a right to be considering she hasn’t actually seen him in half a decade. But it’s true, isn’t it, what she’d written? He’s a drug addict and unreliable and has stolen from all of them, and she’d theorized in the book that his vices stem from grief and longing, a byproduct of his own unique trauma, had detailed his downward spiral they’d all seen coming and hadn’t done anything to slow down. It’s strange to see him now, the living embodiment of her own words. Where does he end and her words begin? Did she create him?

“You’re famous now, sis,” he tells her, proud and angry. “That’s what you wanted, right? For people to know your name. Vanya Hargreeves, little Number Seven. And,” he drops to a whisper, leaning towards her, and his breath reeks of nicotine and alcohol but she doesn’t move away. “People recognize us, too, what fun! When we were teenagers, you know, people on the street cared more - they would point and whisper and share all these little secrets. But no one expects the homeless junkie crashing in the dumpster to be the adopted son - experiment, sorry - of our favourite billionaire, hm? Not until a certain someone lovingly told them where to find moi!”

Vanya hadn’t known he’s been homeless all this time. In her book, she’d written that he’s constantly moving, bouncing from place to place, spending his down time shooting up in alleys, but she’s always just assumed he has a place to go at night, somewhere warm to sleep. 

She feels faintly sick, and she isn’t sure it’s from the grime her brother is getting on her couch.

“You’ve always wanted powers,” Klaus says conversationally. She wants him to stop talking but she can’t bring herself to ask him to leave. “I got it, when we were little, when everything was so bright and shiny. Remember how we thought I didn’t have powers, either? I understood you! I wanted them too! But I thought you’d grown out of it, with the rest of us, as Dad made us practice them. Remember Five’s headaches? Did you even notice when I was gone for days?” He shifts to look at her and their tea is cold but she makes herself drink it anyway, anything to put a barrier between her and his green, green eyes. “Do you remember how Ben cried?”

She does remember, all of it. Five’s too big brain, working too fast, thoughts and equations rattling around so fast it hurt. Klaus, disappearing for days at a time and coming back with red eyes and trembling hands, that descent into addiction that happened slowly and then all at once. Ben, sensitive and quiet, coming apart under the pressure of the Academy.

It’s all in her book.

Klaus laughs, sudden and sharp and brittle like glass. “No,” he says, spinning the mug in his hands, around and around and around. “You still don’t get it. Of course you don’t, why would you? Ordinary little Seven.”

His words cut deeper than they should, after all these years, but the book between them magnifies it all, the little girl in knee-socks and pleated skirt showing them both just how much Vanya hasn’t been able to move on, to let go. She doesn’t think Klaus has, either, and for a second she can see the little boy he’d been in his place, sitting next to the little girl, Four and Seven. Powered and unpowered, hero and ordinary. Addict and writer. Brother and sister.

“You never included me,” she says, finally finding her voice. “None of you. I used to think it was Dad’s doing, leaving me out of training and lessons, but it wasn’t, not completely.”

Klaus looks at her and he isn’t laughing anymore. He looks tired, sad, unlike the Klaus Vanya had written into the world. Fiction and reality blurs together in her memories, spreading like a crevasse between them. She blinks and he’s thirteen, prickly and distant. Blink and he’s eight years old, shy and gentle. Blink. He’s twenty-four, high and sitting in her apartment looking sad, sad, sad.

“You never asked about our powers,” he whispers between them. “You saw what Dad made us do, you helped him run drills. You watched our missions and helped Mom make us whole again. But you never asked.”

“I couldn’t,” she confesses. She’s never told anyone before, no one except for Five, but Five’s gone and she stopped making sandwiches for him a long time ago. “Couldn’t hear you talk about the thing I wanted the most, when you all took it for granted. I just wanted to be your sister.”

“You wanted to be part of the Academy,” he corrects, and Vanya doesn’t deny it. “It wasn’t about being our sister. You never needed powers for that, we would have -  _ I  _ would have been your brother anyway. I tried to be, but you didn’t let me.”

Vanya just remembers the awkward tension crackling between them when Five had forced them together. She remembers the way Klaus had fallen away from her after Five was no longer there, the way he’d taken more and more drugs just so he didn’t have to exist around his remaining siblings. She doesn’t remember ever feeling like he wanted to be her brother.

Klaus sighs, like he can hear what she’s thinking. But that’s not his power.

He drops the mug onto the coffee table, still full, and his hand drifts to the side to rest lightly on the cover of the book. He touches a gentle finger to little Seven’s cheek. “Do you know what it means to see ghosts,” he says, and he’s looking at her but not at the adult next to him. 

She shakes her head. He hums and tilts his head to the side, listening to words she isn’t saying.

“I never told anyone,” he continues, for the first time since he stepped through her door sounding hesitant. “I tried to tell Diego, once, but we were so little, I doubt he remembers. I didn’t tell Five, but the asshole was always too smart for his own good and guessed most of it. I would have told you, Van,” he says, and he sounds so earnest, imploring the picture under his hand to believe him. “I wanted to. I thought maybe since you were ordinary, you’d listen.”

Vanya hasn’t properly felt like someone’s sister since Five disappeared through the front doors, and she knows the rest of her siblings have never considered her as one of them. She’s always been the shadow haunting the Academy, unseen, unheard, unwanted. But she can’t stop seeing tiny Four here on her couch, dismissed by their father and reprimanded for his imaginary friends. When they were small, so small she can barely tell dreams from memory, Seven had thought Four would be like her, that maybe they were ordinary together.

“I’m listening now,” she tells him, and he’s bigger and sadder and broken now but he’s still Four. 

He tells her. At some point he looks at her, really looks at her, and his eyes are big and round and glossy. She’s patient and quiet, not interrupting or pushing even when he falls silent for minutes at a time, staring off into space, occasionally reaching for something that isn’t there. His face falls with his hand and he curls up on himself, but he keeps talking. 

He tells her the ghosts are always there, that he can’t control who or how many he sees. He says Dad lied when he told them Four could conjure the dead, because Klaus has never had any kind of control over them, not once in his life. He tells her how angry they are, driven mad by their own death and years spent not able to interact with anyone or anything, and how it breaks something in them, makes them mindless and feral. He shakes and has to take a moment to remember how to breathe before he tells her how, when the ghosts see him, when they realize he can see them, they start screaming and reaching for him, desperate to get across any kind of message to the living.

“But they’re not the same as when they were alive,” he says, and Vanya doesn’t know when she’d twisted his hand in hers, but she clings to it, holds him tightly so he doesn’t slip away. “They don’t ask to speak to loved ones, or pass on last words. They just want to hurt, Van. They’re so angry and they hate us, hate me, for being alive, for not being able to help them. They want to kill me, Vanya, they do, and I know they can’t hurt me, I know, I know, but the things they  _ say -  _ ” __

Vanya is tiny and weak and can’t gouge out someone’s eyes with a bobby pin like her siblings can, but that doesn’t stop her from reaching out and wrapping Klaus in her arms, hugging him tight and pressing her face into his shoulder. He wavers, taking in a stunned, hitched breath, before tentatively returning the hug. They stay like that as he continues to talk, mumbling into her hair, and Vanya’s shoulders start to ache and she has lessons in the morning but she doesn’t pull away.

“Dad hated that I was afraid,” Klaus says. “He said I had to conquer my fear, to master my own power or whatever the fuck, and he used to- to- for training, he would, and it was so dark, and there were so many of them, and they were so old and so angry and I begged Dad to let me out but he wouldn’t, wouldn’t - ” His arms tighten almost painfully around Vanya, and he stops, breathing deeply, like he’s being coached. She doesn’t say anything, just lets him breathe while she presses her face deeper into the divet between his shoulder and neck to hide the wetness of her eyes. She’s never asked about their training, had never wanted to think too hard about it, had just assumed - she doesn’t know what she’d assumed, but she’d written in her book that it was just another thing their Dad excluded her from, another thing her siblings had over her. She’d written it, so she had believed it to be true, and now everyone in the world also believed it, everyone except the four people left who had lived it. 

She hadn’t known about the mausoleum. Klaus cries as he tells her, and she aches, because she remembers that he had started disappearing for hours or days at a time when they were eight years old, and when they were thirteen she’d thought he was sneaking out to get high. She aches because Klaus had told her, earlier, and she hadn’t understood. Five’s headaches, Ben’s fear, what else has she missed? She’s second-guessing everything she remembers from the Academy, every time Allison was too quiet, every time Luther was in the infirmary with broken bones, the scars Diego seemed to accumulate overnight.

“Stay,” she says when Klaus has exhausted himself of words. He blinks at her through swollen eyes. “For tonight. You can sleep on the couch, and I’ll make breakfast in the morning.” She only has a handful of eggs in her fridge and she’s pretty sure the milk went bad a few days ago, but Klaus is skinny and homeless and probably hasn’t seen homemade food in a while. 

He hesitates, looking away, and she knows he’s going to say no.

“Please,” she says.

Klaus swallows and dips his head, stretching his hands in his lap. “Okay,” he says reluctantly. “Just for tonight.”

He’s been in her apartment for a few hours already and Vanya knows he’s coming down. He hasn’t said in so many words, but she’s seeing him clearer now and starting to connect the dots between years of drug use accompanied by a lifetime of ghosts. She considers asking him if he has anything on him, because she doesn’t really want Klaus taking anything in her home, but she doesn’t. Instead she fetches a spare pillow and blanket and settles Klaus on the couch, urging him to take a glass of water since he didn’t touch the tea.

She goes to bed with the kitchen light on and the curtains open, so that it isn’t dark for him in the living room. She’s nervous about what he might do while she sleeps, whether he’ll take any drugs or steal her things or simply slip out the door, but there’s nothing she can do about any of that now so she just closes her eyes and tries to shut off her thoughts.

He’s still there when she wakes up the next morning. He twitches at shadows and shakes so hard he keeps dropping his fork, and Vanya knows as soon as he steps out the door he’ll be heading straight to a dealer. She thinks it’s still progress. 

Her first student of the day will be arriving soon, so Klaus is helping her with the dishes before he leaves. With their hands all soapy and the front of Klaus’s shirt drenched in water, she asks him to come back before the week is over. Just for a visit, to stay the night, just so she has an excuse to try out a pasta dish she hasn’t been able to bring herself to make just for one.

Klaus is quiet for a long time, long enough that they finish putting away the plates, and they’re both standing at the door, his hand on the handle, before he finally agrees. 

Vanya hasn’t felt like a sister in years, and Klaus is the last sibling she thought she’d connect with in adulthood, but they’re both making progress.

It’s nice.


End file.
